* The commit walkers other than http are officially deprecated, but still supported for now.

* The submodule support has Porcelain layer.

Note that the current submodule support is minimal and this is deliberately so. A design decision we made is that operations at the supermodule level do not recurse into submodules by default. The expectation is that later we would add a mechanism to tell git which submodules the user is interested in, and this information might be used to determine the recursive behaviour of certain commands (e.g. "git checkout" and "git diff"), but currently we haven't agreed on what that mechanism should look like. Therefore, if you use submodules, you would probably need "git submodule update" on the submodules you care about after running a "git checkout" at the supermodule level.

* There are a handful pack-objects changes to help you cope better with repositories with pathologically large blobs in them.

* For people who need to import from Perforce, a front-end for fast-import is in contrib/fast-import/.

* Comes with git-gui 0.8.2.

* Comes with updated gitk.

* New commands and options.

- "git log --date=<format>" can use more formats: iso8601, rfc2822.

- The hunk header output from "git diff" family can be customized with the attributes mechanism. See gitattributes(5) for details.

- "git stash" allows you to quickly save away your work in progress and replay it later on an updated state.

- "git rebase" learned an "interactive" mode that let you pick and reorder which commits to rebuild.

- "git fsck" can save its findings in $GIT_DIR/lost-found, without a separate invocation of "git lost-found" command. The blobs stored by lost-found are stored in plain format to allow you to grep in them.

- $GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable can be used together with $GIT_DIR to work in a subdirectory of a working tree that is not located at "$GIT_DIR/..".

- Giving "--file=<file>" option to "git config" is the same as running the command with GIT_CONFIG=<file> environment.

- "git log" learned a new option "--follow", to follow renaming history of a single file.

- "git filter-branch" lets you rewrite the revision history of specified branches. You can specify a number of filters to modify the commits, files and trees.

***NOTE*** Unfortunately, this changes the format of the $feature{snapshot}{default} entry in the per-site configuration file 'gitweb_config.perl'. It used to be a three-element tuple that describe a single format; with the new configuration item format, you only have to say the name of the format ('tgz', 'tbz2' or 'zip'). Please update the your configuration file accordingly.

- "git diff" does not show differences that come only from stat-dirtiness in the form of "diff --git" header anymore. It runs "update-index --refresh" silently as needed.

- "git tag -l" used to match tags by globbing its parameter as if it has wildcard '*' on both ends, which made "git tag -l gui" to match tag 'gitgui-0.7.0'; this was very annoying. You now have to add asterisk on the sides you want to wildcard yourself.

- The editor to use with many interactive commands can be overridden with GIT_EDITOR environment variable, or if it does not exist, with core.editor configuration variable. As before, if you have neither, environment variables VISUAL and EDITOR are consulted in this order, and then finally we fall back on "vi".

- "git rm --cached" does not complain when removing a newly added file from the index anymore.

- Options to "git log" to affect how --grep/--author options look for given strings now have shorter abbreviations. -i is for ignore case, and -E is for extended regexp.

- "git log" learned --log-size to show the number of bytes in the log message part of the output to help qgit.

- "git log --name-status" does not require you to give "-r" anymore. As a general rule, Porcelain commands should recurse when showing diff.

- "git format-patch --root A" can be used to format everything since the beginning up to A. This was supported with "git format-patch --root A A" for a long time, but was not properly documented.

- "git svn dcommit" retains local merge information.

- "git svnimport" allows an empty string to be specified as the trunk/ directory. This is necessary to suck data from a SVN repository that doe not have trunk/ branches/ and tags/ organization at all.

- "git config" to set values also honors type flags like --bool and --int.

- core.quotepath configuration can be used to make textual git output to emit most of the characters in the path literally.

- "git mergetool" chooses its backend more wisely, taking notice of its environment such as use of X, Gnome/KDE, etc.

- "gitweb" shows merge commits a lot nicer than before. The default view uses more compact --cc format, while the UI allows to choose normal diff with any parent.

- snapshot files "gitweb" creates from a repository at $path/$project/.git are more useful. We use $project part in the filename, which we used to discard.

- "git cvsimport" creates lightweight tags; there is no interesting information we can record in an annotated tag, and the handcrafted ones the old code created was not properly formed anyway.

- "git push" pretends that you immediately fetched back from the remote by updating corresponding remote tracking branches if you have any.

- The diffstat given after a merge (or a pull) honors the color.diff configuration.

- "git commit --amend" is now compatible with various message source options such as -m/-C/-c/-F.

- "git apply --whitespace=strip" removes blank lines added at the end of the file.

- "git fetch" over git native protocols with "-v" option shows connection status, and the IP address of the other end, to help diagnosing problems.

- We used to have core.legacyheaders configuration, when set to false, allowed git to write loose objects in a format that mimicks the format used by objects stored in packs. It turns out that this was not so useful. Although we will continue to read objects written in that format, we do not honor that configuration anymore and create loose objects in the legacy/traditional format.

- "--find-copies-harder" option to diff family can now be spelled as "-C -C" for brevity.

- "pack-objects" honors "delta" attribute set in .gitattributes. It does not attempt to deltify blobs that come from paths with delta attribute set to false.

- "new-workdir" script (in contrib) can now be used with a bare repository.

- "git mergetool" learned to use gvimdiff.

- "gitview" (in contrib) has a better blame interface.

- "git log" and friends did not handle a commit log message that is larger than 16kB; they do now.

- "--pretty=oneline" output format for "git log" and friends deals with "malformed" commit log messages that have more than one lines in the first paragraph better. We used to show the first line, cutting the title at mid-sentence; we concatenate them into a single line and treat the result as "oneline".

- "git p4import" has been demoted to contrib status. For a superior option, checkout the "git p4" front end to "git fast-import" (also in contrib). The man page and p4 rpm have been removed as well.

- "git mailinfo" (hence "am") now tries to see if the message is in utf-8 first, instead of assuming iso-8859-1, if incoming e-mail does not say what encoding it is in.

* Builds

- old-style function definitions (most notably, a function without parameter defined with "func()", not "func(void)") have been eradicated.

- "git tag" and "git verify-tag" have been rewritten in C.

* Performance Tweaks

- "git pack-objects" avoids re-deltification cost by caching small enough delta results it creates while looking for the best delta candidates.

- "git pack-objects" learned a new heuristcs to prefer delta that is shallower in depth over the smallest delta possible. This improves both overall packfile access performance and packfile density.

- diff-delta code that is used for packing has been improved to work better on big files.

- when there are more than one pack files in the repository, the runtime used to try finding an object always from the newest packfile; it now tries the same packfile as we found the object requested the last time, which exploits the locality of references.

- "git svn" misparsed the data from the commits in the repository when the user had "color.diff = true" in the configuration. This has been fixed.

- There was a case where "git svn dcommit" clobbered changes made on the SVN side while committing multiple changes.

- "git-write-tree" had a bad interaction with racy-git avoidance and gitattributes mechanisms.

- "git --bare command" overrode existing GIT_DIR setting and always made it treat the current working directory as GIT_DIR.

- "git ls-files --error-unmatch" does not complain if you give the same path pattern twice by mistake.

- "git init" autodetected core.filemode but not core.symlinks, which made a new directory created automatically by "git clone" cumbersome to use on filesystems that require these configurations to be set.

- "git log" family of commands behaved differently when run as "git log" (no pathspec) and as "git log --" (again, no pathspec). This inconsistency was introduced somewhere in v1.3.0 series but now has been corrected.

- "git rebase -m" incorrectly displayed commits that were skipped.

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Shortlog since v1.5.2.5 is too long, so I'll list just the namesof contributors here and thank everybody.